HSBC CIO Darryl West uses bank adopting cloud-first strategy

HSBC CIO Darryl West discusses bank's cloud-first strategy, and how and why organisation is working with different cloud providers

After graduating from London South Bank University having studied Multimedia Journalism, Chloe joined CIO UK as an online editor. She has a particular interest in digital strategy, UK startups and developing IT skills.

March 14, 2017

CIO UK

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HSBC CIO Darryl West has said the bank is adopting a cloud-first strategy to move away from its legacy infrastructure and mainframes, and help the organisation better support customer demands.

"At the core of our business we are a bank, but we also have a significant technology company embedded within the organisation," he said. "The question that I was asking the management teams was do we really want to compete with the cloud providers and people like Google, are we really going to try and do what they do as well as they do it? Our conclusion was that was it was better if we adopt a cloud-first strategy."

West said HSBC is working with all the big cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and the Microsoft Azure cloud, and will continue a hybrid approach to better serve its 37 million customers and provide different platforms to its data scientists.

"We spent a good amount of time working with all the different cloud providers and evaluating their products. If you look at the scarce talent we have around data analysts and data scientists, they need tools that allow them to do their work in a very productive way," he said.

"There is always a challenge to get data scientists to shift from their favourite platforms - they have really enjoyed that experience."

You can read Matthew Finnegan's full article on HSBC CIO discussing analytics and machine learning capabilities on Computerworld UK.